New Relic University

Optimize your cloud spend

Now that you are using cloud-hosted infrastructure and services, it is important to start looking very early and very closely at your cloud spend:

Make sure that your assumptions about your cloud spend are playing out as expected.

Quickly catch and correct any unexpected spikes in spending.

Start fine-tuning the usage of your cloud-based resources.

For example, if you have a set of 20 instances all running at 10% CPU, you can think about using smaller instances or consolidating more work onto those instances. This kind of thinking about your cloud spend helps you optimize and save money quickly.

New Relic can help you monitor all this. From a data perspective, it is really just another metric that our platform can collect for you. As with any other metric, you can visualize, report, and alert on your cloud spend data, just like you can with any data New Relic can help you collect. Using the New Relic applied intelligence platform is a great way to help you learn about your cloud spending or about any of your performance data.

Example cloud spend workflow

1. Deploy the New Relic Infrastructure agent

Review the requirements for the New Relic Infrastructure agent and follow the documentation for instructions on installing the agent. After you install the Infrastructure agent on your hosts, you immediately have access to the broad spectrum of metrics that the agent receives automatically. Then, you can set up the cloud integration to start collecting billing information.

2. Create Insights dashboard widgets for cloud performance

New Relic Insights is the product that you use to write powerful custom queries about your data, and then visualize the results in widgets that you collect on a dashboard. You can also feed the results of your Insights queries directly into New Relic Alerts, where you can get notifications on any deviations that you specify.

Include widgets for various Infrastructure metrics related to performance and usage; for example:

CPU

Memory

Disk

Database

You may also want to include widgets that represent the application using this cloud infrastructure. In this way you can correlate the cloud infrastructure performance with that of the application. As you right-size your cloud infrastructure, you will want to monitor application performance to make sure you are achieving any targets.

Here is an example of an Insights dashboard for cloud performance.

Break out data by cloud performance and application metrics

The following dashboard shows several widgets that present key cloud infrastructure metrics and an associated application metric. Every one of these widgets represents the result of an Insights query.

5. Add cloud spend and budget widgets to Insights dashboard

New Relic Insights is the product that you use to write powerful custom queries about your data, and then visualize the results in widgets that you collect on a dashboard. You can also feed the results of your Insights queries directly into New Relic Alerts, where you can get notifications on any deviations that you specify.

Here are some examples of ways to use Insights dashboards to visualize your AWS cloud spend data.

Break out data by application and by AWS budget

The following dashboard shows several widgets that present key information about an AWS budget vs. actual spending, with data broken out by an application AWS budget. Every one of these widgets represents the result of an Insights query, and the data in the supporting Insights tables is the data that our integration automatically receives from AWS.

You can also create individual dashboards for each application, and then collect those dashboards together into a data app. This AWS production overview data app shows a set of widgets that are relevant to an AWS production budget.

insights.newrelic.com: This data app collects dashboards together to display AWS budget data in one place.

You may also want to include widgets that represent the application using this cloud infrastructure. In this way you can correlate the cloud infrastructure performance with that of the application. As you right-size your cloud infrastructure, you will want to monitor application performance to make sure you are achieving any targets.

Here is the query to create the production budget widget in this dashboard example:

Data apps are great for presentations to teams and to management in which you want to step through a series of topics but also provide a clear overview of your data.

6. Create dashboards for every level of your organization

Whether you are a developer, in DevOps, or an executive, having information about your cloud spend can help you optimize your cloud environment.

Here are a few ways dashboards can help at each level of your organization:

Dashboards for developers

Understanding how much applications cost to run helps developers properly configure applications to use more efficient services. For example, could developers save cloud costs using Amazon AWS Lambda or properly sized instances instead of randomly selecting an instance?

Dashboards for DevOps

Monitoring application costs allows operators to catch possible overruns due to misconfigured services. For example, is the DevOps team’s auto-scaling configuration not scaling down properly? Are they spending money on instances that are not being used?

Dashboards for executives

An overall view of both forecasted and actual cloud spends for individual applications on a per region basis, as well as total costs, helps executives make better business decisions.

Use New Relic to keep control of your cloud spending costs, and get your teams alerted when you go over your budgets.

7. Set up alerts

New Relic gives you the ability to write baseline queries against your data. A baseline query is a query that you write without setting hard limits on the results and instead let New Relic Applied Intelligence “machine-learn” your performance data. New Relic alerts you when you go too far outside of your baseline numbers.

Configure a baseline query using the forecasted amount

Configuring a baseline query using a forecasted amount is a great starting point for monitoring any cloud budget, as you grow to understand what your cloud spend will be over time. New Relic notifies you if something spikes beyond your forecasted trend. That query looks like this:

When you create a baseline query and alert on it, you decide how restrictively Applied Intelligence should analyze your data using a simple slider and visualization based on your recent performance. The slider either increases or decreases the gray band around your budget threshold (the blue line):

This example would have resulted in zero violations based on recent data, and that is exactly what you are looking for. However, if that blue line spikes up out of the gray band, New Relic notifies you.

For more detailed information about creating, managing, and using alerts, view these New Relic University tutorials: